Monthly Archives: October 2013

Fifteen years ago today, my stepfather died. He was joyful and bawdy and pensive. He was a philosopher and a working class man and an intuit of things he couldn’t explain. He was a skeptic of all politicians and a voter of Republican ones and a believer in a God I’d never heard about in churches. His heart was planet-sized and he brought me into it as his daughter, and he was the best father I had. But he was on loan. This is a piece I recently published in Sweet: A Literary Confection, about how I tried to keep the loss from hurting, a fool’s mission.